"Believe It or Not," Financial-Style

A quick run-in with what to believe and the unbelieveable in my world of finance. Junk mail, both of the digital spam variety and the material snail mail, is an unavoidable reality. Mail and/or spam promises lots of credit cards or an unending supply of sexual enhancements. Sadly, no more Horny TEENage SLuTz wANNT me BAD bad. That must have been the 90's spam phenomenon before the male enhancement drug phenomenon. Mostly, junk mail spam is simply irksome. I've even had a wee little spam draped on to my writing in the comments of this post. On the one hand, at least I know that's a popular post because of the spamming attention it got; on the other hand, I don't do this for some fool to post their meaningless links here. Usually, no one reads this site, so I don't worry. That's sort of the anonymity I'd been able to settle into in my email and financial affairs existence. Any pre-approved credit notice I get is instantly trashed and any sort of enticing sweepstakes notice meets the same fate. Worldly and wise, no? I'm not going to be taken in by any half-baked scheme and I'm smart enough to research everything so I can avoid being victimized, right?

Not so fast. I got something through the mail, did my research, protected myself, and still got an unexpected little shock in a way I'd never imagined.

I received a statement in the mail detailing a court decision in my favor against many credit card companies. Naturally, I liked the looks of this mail, it did look like an official court document, and it says I'm entitled to money. That last part, of course, gives me pause because there isn't such a thing as free money. But this rather extensive statement says, in short, that a settlement (subject to final approval) has been reached in Antitrust Litigation against Visa, MasterCard, and Diners Club card brands because of foreign transactions between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006; if I made any overseas charges on those brands of credit cards during that time period, I'm entitled to some money. The letter and court documents came from www.ccfsettlement.com. I was skeptical. Through my research, I discovered I was not alone. I was satisfied that this mail was legitimate when I found an MSNBC article explaining the court decision. I did think that it would be easy for a dedicated web designer to fake all of this and I could be blindly submitting my info for anyone to receive. Granted I'm only providing my mailing address, but still; why give anyone any contact information anymore? I question what to believe in media since current technology has enough editing tools to create very believable fakes of people, places, and documents.

The problem was, while I was busy researching and supposedly protecting myself, I learned that my identity had already been stolen years ago, completely unnoticed.

I would never have known had I not started to look at buying property. Thanks to a real estate agent, I learned that my identity via my ss# was taken by a "Raymond Joe" in 2001 for a Sprint account. My financial identity is probably one of the last ones anyone would want to steal because I've done enough damage to own credit in the past and have had to build my financial self back up slowly over the past few years. I'm also lucky that I only got one small theft of my vested self, at least that I know of now. I don't have the first clue how anyone would get my ss# or why they would use it to only open a lousy Sprint account for a few months. Ironically, Raymond and Joe are both family names and Sprint fired my uncle during downsizing years ago.

It was odd putting up all my protection only to learn I had already been robbed. Strange thinking that anyone would be foolish enough to steal my identity, mostly because I didn't think it would get anyone very much, yet finding out it had already happened a long time ago, to my complete obliviousness. And to think someone took a little piece of me out there, looking to better himself. That's oddly flattering, but it's attention I can do without.

This wasn't a quick run-in at all.